I Heart Aggregation

The Hype Machine brings something to the music fan because it aggregates music from thousands of personal music blogs and lets you do something with it: love it. You love it by interacting with it and discovering how others are interacting it. Just check out the /popular page to get a sense of how this works. You’re basically getting music from live concerts that just happened and under-the-radar recommendations from people who live this stuff. In other words, the music that shows up on The Hype Machine, for the most part, is highly personal and word of mouth.

TIOTI does the same thing for TV. It aggregates it and lets you put your meta information on it - your love - and discover what others feel is worth loving.

These services are finding the meaningful (music, TV, art, ____) at the edge and giving it structure while still keeping it intact. And they can be a business through advertising, indirect e-commerce, direct e-commerce, premium services, community-based content, and search, and I’m sure there are other methods and models (like Radiohead’s In Rainbows and Amazon’s Web services platform) that will soon start to reveal themselves.